Edmund Rubbra: String Quartets 1/3/4 (Naxos Audio CD)

• The Maggini Quartet’s Naxos recordings of English string quartets by composers from Alwyn to Walton have gained numerous awards and critical plaudits. Their recording of Edmund Rubbra’s String Quartet No. 2 (8.572286) was praised as ‘superbly integrated… undeniably a great success’ by Gramophone.

• The English composer Edmund Rubbra described the string quartet as ‘the purest and most lucid texture available to a composer’, his essays in the form enlivened by Beethovenian vigour and song-like beauty.

• It is a testament to his profound compositional craftsmanship that even when deploying diverse rhythms simultaneously or releasing the latent potential of what he called the ‘most positive yet mysterious intervals’, Rubbra weaves fascinating musical textures into a satisfying whole.

• His remaining three string quartets, heard here, mark Rubbra as a great, though still undervalued, English composer whose music boasts an inexhaustible sense of freshness, a richly hued emotional palette and an abiding sense of optimism.